Dividing the Aegean Sea : A Plan in Progress?

Over the past sixteen months, a well-constructed and largely
successful effort has been underway in U.S. foreign policy circles to help
deliver the eastern seabed, waters and, perhaps, islands of Greece in the
Aegean Sea to Turkey, in the name of peace. Though the approach does not
reflect stated American policy in the region, it has been actively promoted
in various independent forums that bear great potential influence on
foreign policy planning in Washington.

Greek ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention in January, 1995,
granted it the right to extend its territorial seas from six miles to
twelve, including in the Aegean Sea. Turkish charges that such extension
would convert the Aegean into a Greek lake, and close off most high-seas
passageways off the Turkey's western coastline, led to the acceleration of
its decades-old plan to redraw the Aegean borders.

The program has proceeded with few significant obstacles, and may prepare
the groundwork for extensive pressure on Greece to seriously contemplate
the division of the Aegean Sea, along with its geostrategic prominence and
undisclosed oil and mineral resources.

An analysis of this development, which will be increasingly reliant on
American positioning in the months and years ahead, necessarily begins with
a review of official U.S. actions impacting customary relations between
Greece and Turkey.

On June 11, 1983, the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency published a map of the
Aegean Sea section between the Greek island of Kalimnos and the Turkish
coastal area around Kadirga Burnu. Based on British and Italian surveys
conducted through 1933, it includes small Greek islets named Nisoi Limnia.
The agency updated its regional map on November 17, 1990, with the same
Nisoi Limnia marked clearly as Greek territories, based on surveys and
charts taken through 1989. By January, 1996, while Turkey was carrying out
the unprecedented claim on Greek territory at Imia, the Defense Mapping
Agency published yet another updated map of the area. This one was marked
by a subtle, yet consequential, change -- the Imia islets were unnamed,
except for the description "Sovereignty undetermined."

During a four-week period preceding the January 27 map, Ankara had been
insisting to Athens that Imia constituted a part of Turkish territory, and
was already registered as part of the Turkish province of Mugla. After
Greece rejected the claim, Turkey called for negotiations concerning the
status of Imia and all "the small islands, islets and rocks in the Aegean"
whose status, it claimed, was not well determined. Though the two
countries' armed forces were quickly disengaged from all-out war over the
Imia crisis, the ensuing diplomatic exchange remained furious. Turkey
immediately linked the Imia question to other sovereignty challenges
throughout the Aegean.

The U.S. mapping agency claims that a staff oversight produced the error on
the January, 1996 map. No definitive explanation has been provided
regarding the initial basis for questioning Greek sovereignty over Imia,
which the U.S. previously recognized without equivocation. The agency
notes that the State Department mandated Imia be properly recognized as
Greek, under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, "the authority on sovereignty in
the area," when the map is updated.

In the meantime, U.S. maps retracting recognition are in circulation,
Turkey's threats are escalating, and its primary objective has been more
effectively promulgated over the past sixteen months -- Turkey believes it
is entitled to a greater portion of the Aegean Sea than it possesses today,
and that Greece is obligated to compromise its sovereignty and territorial
integrity to meet such demands.

Ankara's claims on Greek sovereignty date back at least to 1973, when the
national petroleum company dispatched the naval vessel "Cardali" to conduct
research on the seabed just outside Greek territorial waters in the
northern Aegean Sea. Greece and Turkey nearly went to war in 1987, when a
Turkish oceanographic vessel conducted similar activities in related areas.

For twenty-four years, Ankara has smartly emphasized that "the proper way
to settle any dispute or misunderstanding is through diplomatic
negotiations to be held in good faith and in an open-minded manner." Such
language is perfectly in tune with the dominant philosophy in Washington,
which believes that just about every diplomatic problem can be resolved if
disputing parties engage in negotiations.

Greece's position that issues of national sovereignty and territorial
integrity are non-negotiable is well-grounded and legally incontestable.
It is highly problematic from the geopolitical standpoint which
Washington's policy planners view the region. For American foreign policy
makers, the preservation of secularism in a pro-U.S. Turkey is paramount.
Turkey's violations of international law, its aggressions against peaceful
nations, and its abuses of the human rights of millions of own citizens are
countenanced for the sake of American strategic interests in the region.
Greece's continued failure to confront this fundamental reality, while
Turkey accuses Greece violating international law in asserting its right to
extend its territorial waters, defend its eastern Aegean islands, and
maintain a ten-mile airspace, permits Ankara to effectively argue that its
claims on the Aegean Sea are meritorious and well-intentioned. Public
evidence of this success has been glaringly evident in recent months.

During the summer of 1996, a geostrategic analysis entitled "Aegean Angst:
The Greek-Turkish Dispute," was published in a U.S. Department of the Navy
journal. Among the recommendations was a demarcation line through the
Aegean Sea, drawn along the midpoint of two median lines, one between the
Greek and Turkish coasts without regard to the Greek islands, and one
between the islands' baseline and that of the Turkish coast. A similar
model was used to demarcate the continental shelf between Great Britain and
France, allowing twelve nautical miles of territorial waters around the
British Channel Islands and awarding all waters beyond those limits to the
French.

The Navy report also held that "it is necessary to move beyond the confines
of purely legal analysis," and that resolution of the disputes "must blend
law with both practicality and a sensitivity to the reasonable concerns of
the other side," positions with which Turkey completely agreement and
energetically advances.

In early 1997, the Institute for National Strategic Studies, an independent
institute providing academic research and analysis for the Pentagon,
published its annual Strategic Assessment. The section analyzing Greece
and Turkey included a map of the Aegean Sea divided by the maritime borders
established with precision by the Italy-Turkey Peace Treaty of 1932. In
the institute's view, however, the official, internationally recognized
border was merely the "Greek position on the continental shelf." To its
west lies a jagged line depicting the "possible Turkish position on the
continental shelf." It slices through the heart of the Aegean Sea,
separating the Cyclades Islands from the Dodecanese Islands, and cutting in
half the territorial waters surrounding the northern Aegean islands of
Limnos and Samothrace. For more than a year, a similar map has been on
display inside a high-level State Department office, with the eastern
Aegean Sea shaded in along roughly the same demarcation line.

In March 1997, the U.S. Naval Institute, a private, non-profit group
focusing on American naval interests, published an analysis of
Greek-Turkish tensions entitled "The Aegean Sea: A Crisis Waiting to
Happen." Acknowledging that "Greece is far weaker than Turkey, and its
Aegean islands close to the Turkish are hopelessly exposed," the author
warns that the Law of the Sea Convention is ill-equipped to provide legal
solutions to the Aegean questions. He also maintains that the Aegean
question, involving international maritime for Russian, Ukraine, Bulgaria
and Romania, as well as commercial air traffic between Europe and Asia,
transcends Greek and Turkish national interests.

In the event the Turkish military reacts to a Greek extension of
territorial waters, it is proposed that the United Nations be called in to
suspend all jurisdiction claims in the Aegean and bring the region under
the international body's authority. A U.N. naval peacekeeping force would
occupy the Aegean Sea to ensure safe international air and sea passage,
while the Security Council would advance a Greek-Turkish treaty permitting
"a creative division of the continental shelf."

In 1975, Greece and Turkey agreed to submit the delimitation of the Aegean
continental shelf for adjudication before the International Court of
Justice [ICJ]. Shortly afterward, Ankara decided that a political course
relying upon bilateral negotiations was the only fruitful means for
resolution and withdrew from the ICJ process.

As this position continues to be successfully promulgated into the journals
and debates of U.S. policy planning and the foreign policy establishment,
Greece needs to urgently revisit its American strategy. Its apparent lack
of concern for American public opinion, and for the planning process which
guides policy makers beyond that small group whose professional titles
happen to include the words "Greece" or Cyprus," has contributed to the
success of the Turkish effort to push for the division of the Aegean Sea.
The voters of Greece may well believe that international law is sufficient
to protect Greece's sovereign rights, but the strength of their
government's arguments is eroding in Washington. The profit potential of
expanded business opportunities in a Turkish economic market of 62 million,
coupled with a growing reliance on the Turkish military to stem the tide of
Islamic fundamentalism, has allowed Ankara to squeeze a series of unique
concessions from its Western allies.

As long as geopolitical and strategic considerations -- such as Iranian
muscle-flexing, Iraqi aggression, untapped Caspian oil reserves, and
Israeli-Syrian tensions -- dominate American interests in the region, legal
matters such as Greece's protections under international law, as well as
the ongoing occupation of Cyprus, will remain relegated as secondary
impediments to a strong U.S.-Turkish relationship.

Greece must transform its insistence on legal protections into an authentic
warning to the world that Turkish success at forcibly redrawing
international borders threatens not only their respective inviolability,
but world order on a urgent scale. Instability in the Persian Gulf, around
Israel, in the Taiwanese Straits, the former Soviet republics in the
Caucuses region, on the Korean peninsula, and other global flashpoints have
been spawned by attempts to gain riches, resources and power through the
use of force to gain territory and redraw international borders. The
conflict in the Balkans, requiring 35,000 American servicemen to impose a
tenuous peace, was triggered by the military efforts to reconfigure the
provincial borders of a nation-state which no longer exists.

If Greece decides it is willing to defend its sovereignty, muscular
diplomacy and military vigor, coupled with American media and mass
communications strategies, must be forcefully utilized to demonstrate to
Washington:

the consequences of a NATO ally and European Union member forced to
choose between territorial dismemberment and all-out war against the
predominant military power in the region;

the divisive national debate over dispatching tens of thousands of
America's men and women in uniform to the Aegean Sea, between two of the
most heavily armed nations in the world, fully at war utilizing some of the
most technically advanced, U.S.-built weapons systems available;

the staggering economic, political and strategic costs to the United
States of such a confrontation, unwittingly spurred by misguided American
tolerance of Turkey's illegal provocations. Greece's options are not many.
Its recent successes in garnering serious American support are even fewer.
The failure to secure Washington's guarantees that borders remain
inviolable, and that destabilizing threats of force are punished, threatens
not only the integrity of the Greek state, but the security of Kuwait,
Israel, Taiwan, South Korea and others pivotal nations whose borders and
sovereignty undergo constant challenge.

As long as influential interests in Washington insist that Turkey's
considerations outweigh those of Greece, that the asymmetry between Greece
and Turkey in American policy formulation is justified, and that Greece
consider negotiating its national sovereignty and territorial integrity in
exchange for peace, the plan to divide the Aegean Sea may one day triumph.

The Western Policy Center (916-383-7000) is a public policy corporation
monitoring U.S. strategic interests in southeastern Europe. The author is
a government relations specialist, and formerly served as an Executive
Assistant to U.S. Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-NY).